Alastair Mactaggart on Data Privacy Laws

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, have you ever stopped to think about how much Google might know about you? Well, this was a question that galvanized our next guest into action. Alastair Mactaggart, a real estate developer in San Francisco, spearheaded an initiative which saw California adopt the toughest digit privacy law in the United States. As it wants to go into — as it waits to go into effect next year, Mactaggart now wants to go one step further, and he’s launching a new initiative against the tech giants. He sat down with our Hari Sreenivasan to discuss how and why he’s fighting for people’s privacy.

HARI SREENIVASAN, CONTRIBUTOR: You were behind a privacy initiative in California. You’re a real estate guy. Why was this important to you?

ALASTAIR MACTAGGART, FOUNDER & CHAIR, CALIFORNIANS FOR CONSUMER PRIVACY: It’s a great question and it’s one that always perplexes I think everybody. Actually, it perplexes me because I don’t really know how I got here. I literally had a conversation one day with a Google engineer, and there was something in the press that day about privacy and I asked him, hey, is there a big deal about this? And I expected him to say, nothing to see here. And he said you’d be terrified if you knew how much we knew about everybody. And that got me thinking, you know, I can find out from the government, actually, with the freedom of information act. I should probably be able to find out from companies. And I can’t. And then I thought, you know, someone should do something about that. And after a couple weeks, I thought, maybe I’m somebody.

SREENIVASAN: So, as this starts to gain momentum, are you thinking to yourself, there’s definitely another side to this and they’re going to push back?

MACTAGGART: Yes. So, what happens is, you can form an opposition committee. And literally, everybody, you know, Amazon, Microsoft, Uber, you know, the biggest companies in the world joining, Facebook. And at one point, I did the math and the market cap of the companies opposing me was $6 trillion. And —

SREENIVASAN: You don’t have that much.

MACTAGGART: No. I’m not actually a trillionaire. So, yes, that was a sobering kind of time when you thought about that.

SREENIVASAN: So, at its core, how do you boil down what the initiative was about?

MACTAGGART: So, the initiative did three basic things. The first one was it gave you the right to know what information these companies had collected about you. Pretty simple. The second one was, let me tell you not to sell it. I want to be able to tell you not to sell it. We’ve all read the privacy policies. We’ve all been confused by the privacy policies. We’ve all gotten to the end of the privacy policies and–

SREENIVASAN: And just said I accept.

MACTAGGART: — and said I don’t even know what that just said.

SREENIVASAN: Right.

MACTAGGART: I do this. I still don’t know. They’re drafted by the smartest people in the world, sadly to intentionally mislead you. So I wanted to be able to say I never want to read another privacy policy in my life. I want to just say, don’t sell my information. And the third thing — this was right around Equifax — we said, actually, you should take care of my personal information. And so we said there are increased penalties for data breaches.

SREENIVASAN: So, I should have a right to know what information you have on me.

MACTAGGART: Right to say no.

SREENIVASAN: Right to say no. And then a right that if you have my information, that you keep it safe.

MACTAGGART: Keep it safe.

SREENIVASAN: Seems relatively straightforward.

MACTAGGART: Right.

SREENIVASAN: What’s the concern against that?

MACTAGGART: Well, I think the concern, you know, is that this industry is very young, very new, and they’ve never had any regulation, really, of any kind of — you know, there are of course the labor laws and all the normal stuff applies to them, but in terms of what they do, they have this halo over the whole industry. And I think just kind of reflectively, they were reacting saying, we’re not going to have that here.

SREENIVASAN: You know, a company that provides you some services under the guise of free is going to say, listen, this is the quid pro quo. I’m going to give you free e-mail. I’m going to give you the ability to keep in touch with all of your family and friends. I’m giving you these amazing shopping coupons when you come to my site. And that, in exchange, you’re giving me a little bit of information on what you’re buying, where you are, who you’re talking to. What’s the harm?

MACTAGGART: So, here’s the difference. I think we all grew up watching T.V., listening to the radio. We’re all used to commercials, right? And my initiative which is now the law makes a distinction between what’s called contextual advertising and behavioral advertising. Contextual is, I’m reading an article about New Zealand. An ad for Air New Zealand pops up. No one has any problem with that, you know? And by the way, that’s even better than old T.V. T.V. was just we’re going to show an ad for beer on Super Bowl and hope someone buys the beer.

SREENIVASAN: Right.

MACTAGGART: This is actually much better. And by the way, that contextual technology is what fueled the rise of Google, Facebook. It is worth trillions of dollars, right? What’s recently happened, since you know — the smartphone’s only like 12 years old. What’s happened now is we are — if you’re those businesses, we’re being tracked 24/7/365, all of your searches, all of your location, who you’re standing next to, what apps you have installed, what you’re looking for, what you’re interested in. That’s now going into this massive file. If I know everything about you, now I can sort of anticipate. So, here’s an interesting study. There was a fellow, a professor of business at the Stanford Business School. He came up with an algorithm where with access to 300 of your likes on Facebook, he could predict your answers to a well-known personality quiz, you know, a very standard personality quiz, better than your spouse, better than all your co-workers, better than everybody who knows you. It’s the ubiquitous tracking, that’s what is the real problem.

SREENIVASAN: And where is that tracking going and who owns that information? Is it, let’s say for example, medical information that I might be sharing information with my doctor in an e-mail or attachments, et cetera, et cetera. I might have been going to a specific hospital over and over again, and let’s say you know that that’s a cancer unit. Where’s all that information going? Who’s going to do what with it?

MACTAGGART: So, here’s the crazy thing, when you’re at the hospital or when you’re talking to your doctor, there’s a federal law called HIPAA. Super strict about your privacy. But if you’re wearing a wearable that’s collecting your blood pressure and your, how many steps you’ve taken, all that, which is super intimate, not covered by HIPAA. People think it is. It’s not. That’s for sale, depending on which provider you have, which piece of hardware you have. If I know that you’re searching for depression or I know that you’re searching for schizophrenia, now, you may be doing it for a niece, you may be doing it for someone else in your life, but that kind of goes into your file. So, where’s this all going? This is all going into the data mall of these giant corporations that every single thing you do is being filed. So, now like the New York Department of Life Insurance now allows companies to look at your social media. So, there is this sense of, if — you know, I’ve sometimes thought, am I going to search for that medical term? Is that going to end up on somewhere affecting my life insurance? There’s this weird sense —

SREENIVASAN: If you keep searching for diabetes, maybe we should charge him a higher price.

MACTAGGART: Absolutely. It’s in his family. It goes to the risk. And here’s the other thing, you don’t have to be logged in to one of this big Facebook or Google. You don’t have to be a user. You don’t have to be a registered member. But because they have the links, and sometimes you can see them, like the Facebook like button. And sometimes they’re just what’s called an invisible pixel that’s firing back. But basically, every website you visit, every page you visit is being logged, how long you’re on it, what you looked at is being logged by these giant corporations because it’s really easy for them to do it. It’s basically free, so why not do it?

SREENIVASAN: So, here are all these companies on the opposite side of the table from you. Did you ever feel that this could be a threat to you as a person or the business that you run?

MACTAGGART: You know, so, at one point, I knew I had enough money to get the initiative on the ballot. But I thought, you know, if I’m going to run an expensive campaign, why don’t I try and go out and find other people who are like-minded? So I tried to meet billionaires who I thought, OK, these are the people who will contribute. And I had a really good meeting with one. And I said to him, hey, look, would you, you know, consider supporting us? And he’s like, look, I like what you do, I think it’s a great idea, but I could never support you. Why? And he said, because these people are really powerful and they could really hurt my business. And I remember thinking, your business? And then on cue, he says, how’s your business doing, Alastair? And as I left that meeting, I thought to myself, actually, there is no legal reason why they couldn’t just eradicate my business from the Internet, so you couldn’t find my buildings, right? I’m in the real estate business. That’s power. That’s real power. So, yes, I was scared. I was scared — I actually think that’s probably not going to happen because I think in general these companies have a franchise they don’t want to risk, but the theoretical possibility was sobering.

SREENIVASAN: So, what happened? How did that get to be where it is?

MACTAGGART: So, what happened is — so, we got the signatures. We’re now in May of 2018. And right around that time, a guy named Senator Hertzberg, Robert Hertzberg, who is now the majority leader in the Senate here in California, got a hold of my campaign manager and arranged a meeting for me. So we went in to meet him and he said we should do a deal. Once you get your signatures, you can take your initiative off the ballot, presuming that we pass a law that you like. So I thought, well, I’ll talk to the guy because anything’s possible. And I thought to myself, there’s just no way that’s going to happen because these companies are not going to allow this to happen, you know? In the case of the legislature, I thought they’ve got more power there than I do. Long story short, we had a deal. And my wife took a look at me. She’s like, you go to Sacramento and you make sure this deal happens. You’ve been working on this for two years, you go up. So I spent three days in Sacramento walking the halls telling legislators why I actually thought it was a good deal. Then on the third day, we voted. And that was actually something that was extraordinary for me. It was voted out of both Houses unanimously, which I didn’t in a million years ever thought —

SREENIVASAN: Bipartisan consent?

MACTAGGART: Bipartisan consent.

SREENIVASAN: Because privacy isn’t about red or blue.

MACTAGGART: Correct.

SREENIVASAN: And if it can happen in California, do you think it can happen elsewhere?

MACTAGGART: I do. I think people are — I think people are fed up and they’re resigned at the same time. They don’t like it, but they know they need the technology to live in today’s world. You can’t have a job without a cell phone. Your kids. You know, you can’t — you can’t not use Google. You can’t not search on the Internet. And so, people know this is happening. And by the way, this is making me sound like I think these companies are bad. I don’t think they’re bad. The fact that I can carry around the world’s libraries in my pocket is an extraordinary, wonderful thing. The fact that I can go to Google and find any information is an extraordinary and wonderful thing. So I don’t think it’s all bad. But it’s a balance. And the question is, what do they do with that information and where’s the bargain — where should it be struck? And right now, I think that the problem is that the balance is too much in favor of the corporations. And by the way, this is nothing new in the history of business.

SREENIVASAN: Right.

MACTAGGART: You know, we’ve seen this hundreds of times, hundreds of years of business regulation. Business gets to here and then the people say, wait a second, shouldn’t there be labor laws? Shouldn’t there be child labor laws? Shouldn’t there be vehicular safety laws? And that’s what we’re seeing right now. It’s just we’re seeing an attempt to redress the balance a little bit and make it a little more equal.

SREENIVASAN: So as we speak, you’ve got a new initiative that you’ve just sent up. What is that one about?

MACTAGGART: It’s about giving some additional rights. You know, what’s happened in the two years since I filed the initiative — I mean, the world keeps on changing, so this is before Cambridge Analytica, before Equifax, before Facebook pays a $5 billion fine, before Google pays a $178 million fine for intentionally violating kids’ privacy. So, this is — so, the business world has not been chastened by this. They haven’t stopped doing what they’re doing, so we’re saying, look, we need some additional rights. There’s a category in the new initiative of personal information that’s so sensitive that businesses would have to get your permission to sell it, that you’d be able to say, actually, no, you can’t advertise to me based on my religion. I just want to be able to take that off the table. You can’t advertise to me based on my precise geolocation. Why should you get to know exactly where I am, whether I went to church today, what religion I am, which you can track? You can put a geo fence around any building in this country and track every single smartphone going in and out and advertisers will sell you that information.

SREENIVASAN: In the new initiative, what are you looking for in terms of infrastructure to try and enforce this all?

MACTAGGART: In the new initiative, what we’re proposing is the creation of an entity called the California Privacy Protection Agency, and that’s going to be a stand-alone entity. Right now, the authority to enforce it under existing law is going to be the attorney general, who I’m a big fan of, but he has said — and I understand this — his plight, look, he’s set up to be a cop, not a regulator. A lot of this is regulation, it’s issuing guidelines, responding to inquiries. So we’re setting up a dedicated group that will be staffed with experts who will have the deep institutional knowledge necessary to regulate a really complicated industry.

SREENIVASAN: So, right now the law that you’ve already pushed through is some of the strongest privacy language in the country.

MACTAGGART: It is the strongest law, no question.

SREENIVASAN: Right?

MACTAGGART: Yes.

SREENIVASAN: There’s kind of a European version, so to speak. And they have that rule. Federally, there is nothing on the books for the U.S. government and all citizens in the land that has been proposed that would match either the European standard or the California standard. What happens if Congress tries to tackle this, but it’s weaker than the California standard?

MACTAGGART: That was always — is a possibility, always has been a possibility. We live in a federal country. So, I have a couple answers. One, if you have a federal law, it doesn’t have to preempt the states. So, there’s the HIPAA. We mentioned that before. That’s the health law. There’s something called Gramm Leach Bliley, that’s the financial privacy law. Both of those are national laws, but they’re minimum standards. They say every state has to do this, but any state can go further, right? So, that model right there, I’m like, well, great, let’s have a national privacy law but let the states go further. It’s called a floor, not a ceiling. That’s one thing. The second thing I would say is, OK, we are the fifth largest economy in the world in the State. One in eight Americans lives here. The speaker of the House is from here. One of the leading presidential candidates is from here. All of these politicians, many of them, have publicly stated that they won’t accept anything that’s weaker than California in terms of a privacy standard. Twenty percent of the House Democratic Caucus is from California. So it’s really upper most in my mind that one of the reasons to do this right now is to raise the bar nationally, because I think what I’m going to be seeing is, hey, we’re going to qualify, we’re going to go into this election. We’re polling literally in the 90s right now. And my pollster said last time she saw numbers like this, there was a ballot initiative a few years ago that banned human trafficking in California, which is, like this is that kind of territory.

SREENIVASAN: So, look, I can see the campaign ads right now against you. This is going to be a job-killer. Technology’s going to leave California or they’re going to go to some other state that doesn’t have these, you know, all this red tape, right? How do you create a scenario where you can tell the public that this is actually possible, that you can get your data, that this is enforceable and that this can happen in this state without an economic cost?

MACTAGGART: Couple of answers there. One, that this is happening whether or not this initiative goes forward. That is happening in January. So that law’s already passed. And by the way, the tech companies spent all of 2019 trying to destroy it, and I spent all of 2019 trying to make sure it stayed intact, and other advocates and I were able to keep it basically no bad amendments, which was sustained nine-month assault. Our legislature ends in September, so that’s over. We succeeded. So I don’t think they’re going to be able to do it next year. In terms of the Californian job-killer thing, I think, first of all, Californians have heard it before, but was really interesting when we did our focus groups, and the place that was most concerned about privacy and least sympathetic to this job-killing thing was the ones — were the ones we did in Silicon Valley. I’ll never forget this one lady saying, you know what, they’re building a space ship down the street from me — she’s talking about Apple — she’s like, they have the money. I don’t care. This is important stuff.

SREENIVASAN: How much did it cost to take the positions that you’re taking now?

MACTAGGART: You know, it’s in — look, it’s in the millions of dollars and it’s — so it’s a huge amount of money.

SREENIVASAN: You had to pay to get the signatures. You had to pay for lobbyists. What does that say about where our democracy is, that this is what it takes, a lot of money and hard work to try to get an idea into law?

MACTAGGART: I mean, look, I think that there are — you know, I think the citizens united was a horrible case, and that’s not this particularly. Interesting thing about this process, the initiative process, this process was created by a guy named Hiram Johnson, who was the governor in the early part of the last century, in order to allow people to stand up to the big corporate interests. So, I think his idea was that people would actually gather the signatures. I’m a little bit removed from that. I’m actually paying people. But if you think about what I spent, in the low millions — and again, that’s a huge sum — but think about that in the context of an opposition that was worth $6 trillion last February. This is not even a rounding error for them. It’s spare change. The concept that I could spend that kind of money and win against an industry that formidable is something that you could only see in America. So, I get that it’s a ton of money and people will criticize me for having too much money to do this stuff. And yet, when you think about the, OK, I’m a wealthy David, but the goliath over here was — you’ve never seen an industry like that. So, I do think that there is — you have to look at it in perspective, and it’s the wealthiest corporations the world’s ever seen.

SREENIVASAN: Alastair Mactaggart, thank you so much for joining us.

MACTAGGART: Thank you.